Bernard Shaw - 1887

Karl Marx and "Das Kapital" [Third Notice]

Written:
1887First Published: 1887Source: The
National Reformer, August 21st 1887Transcription: Steve PalmerMarkup:Steve PalmerProofread:UnknownCopyleft: Internet
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Undisturbed by any suspicion of the slip in the analysis by
which he laid bar; as he thought, the true value form of wares, Marx
proceeds to a minute and apparently exhaustive analysis of simple
circulation, and of the functions of money, which he regards asthe
material form of exchange value. Some of the assertions which occur in
these analyses would make a banker gasp if he took them, as he well
might at a casual dip into the book, for statements of fact,
unconditioned by the stage of the inquiry at which they are made, or by
the normal economic hypothesis as to equal opportunity, fertility,
etc., which Marx seems to take for granted, as henowhere explicitly
expostulates them. As the inquiry proceeds, the statements are modified
by the new considerations successively introduced; so that it is
possible to quote sentences from different pages, apparently flatly
contradicting one another, and yet both accurate relatively to the
conditions assumed.

Throughout the chapters on money, the reader is conscious that
the distinction between use value (corresponding to Jevons's total
utility) and exchange value (final utility) is being seduously forced
upon his attention. They arenot merely distinguished, but almost
violently exhibited as antagonistic, likened to two opposite poles of a
magnet, and forced asunder in his conception by every available
rhetorical or dialectical artifice. In this Marx is leading up to his
cardinal fact that the proletarian workman, individualist appropriation
of the land having deprived him of the raw material without which his
labour power is useless to him,has to live by selling that labour power
as a ware in the market. Now in purchasing a ware in the market, you
practically buy its use value for its exchange value-its total utility
for its final utility. In the instance given here last week of an
article with ause value or total utility expressed by £3 3s., we saw
that additional quantities were thrown on the market until the price
fell to £1,. the cost of production ; and that this became the normal
price. A total utility of £3 3s.was thus sold for £1 ; or, as Marx
might have put it, if he had not missed the secret of the expression of
use value by money, a use value of £3 3s. sold for an exchange value
of £1. Now when the workman sells his labour power for wages in the
market, he does this very thing, sells its total benefit for the mere
cost of producing it-its use value for its exchange value. But,
according to the Marxian theory, the value of a man's labour power is
the abstract human labour embodied in the victual that has created and
nourished it. Thus if the labour necessary to produce a day's victual
be six hours, that will be the value of a day's labour power. But a
day's labour power may be exerted during twelve hours. In that case the
labourer in the first six hours of the day will replace the value of
six hours' labour embodied in his victual. In the remaining six hours
he produces as much value again; and this, which Marx calls surplus
value, goes to the purchaser of the labour power. In other words, the exercise
of twelve hours' labour power appears as the consumption
of six hours' labour power. Therefore, you can go into a market wherein
labour power is for sale, with gold that took six hours' labour to
make; buy with it as much labour force as took six hours to make;
vicariously exercise that purchased labour power during twelve hours,
and return to the market with the product, which, because it embodies
twelve hours' labour, you can exchange for twelve hours' worth of gold.
Thus you have doubled your gold by simply buying in the morning for £1
and selling in the evening for £2. To this a physiocrat would have
answered that if Dick can exploit Tom in that fashion, Tom is equally
free to exploit Dick; and the net result must he that, though Tom gets
six hours surplus labour out of Dick, Dick can get the same out of Tom,
and both will be equally well off at the end of the day; so that whilst
there is surplus value, it is not misappropriated. But if Dick is a
proprietor, and Tom a proletarian, which is what Marx means, then Dick
is under no obligation to sell his labour power at all, since he can
produce with it for himself out of the land and raw material contained
in his property, whilst Tom, the propertyless, must either sell his
labour power or starve. Further, Tom must sell it either to Dick or to
some other proprietor: he cannot sell it to a fellow proletarian, to
whom it would be useless for the same reason (lack of material ) that
it is useless to himself.

Now though the process here described is at the first blush
remarkably like what is actually taking place, Marx's theory of it will
nor bear examination any better than his analysis of wares did. In the
firstplace, the proprietor's monopoly completely upsets those
conditions as to equal opportunity, etc-, on which alone it is true
that "commodities in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or
which can be produced in the same time, have the same value". The
commodity which the proprietor offers is not gold or any other ware it
is access to the material of production, a privilege which costs the
proprietor no labour, and is yet of practically infinite utility tothe
proletarian, since it is a matter of life or death to him. Again, the
commodity, labour-power, which the proletarian offers to the
proprietor, differs from ordinary wares in one respect, the immense
importance of which will appear if the bargain
between proprietor and proletarian be followed carefully. The
proletarian says, in effect, to the proprietor, "I have to sell to you
my labour-force, which will enable you to produce without consuming-to
live without working. I want in exchange access to the land, which will
enable me to live byworking." Evidently the proletarian is
at a disadvantage; for the proprietor's commodity, life itself, is of
far greater utility than the proletarian's, which
is only idleness-i dleness for the proprietor at the cost of toil for
himself. Therefore the proletarian loses by the exchange, and would, if
the commodities in question were of the usual kind, direct his labour
in future to the production of fresh land instead of fresh
labour-power. But the first course is impossible, since the labourer is
not Jehovah. All he can do, then, is to abstain from producing fresh
labour-power and so cheapening it by increasing the supply. But now he
is baffled by the factthat unskilled labour-power differs from all
other commodities in that its production, instead ofbeing an effort or
a sacrifice, is a pleasurable act to which man isdriven by an
irresistible instinct. Therefore fresh supplies of unskilled
labour-force pour into the market; and the successive increments are
less and less desired by the proprietary class, as, when they have
added luxury to its idleness, they can only add satiety to its luxury,[1] whilst its property remains as
necessary to the workers as ever. The price of labour-force falls thus
until it reaches subsistence wage, then starvation wage, and finally
zero: the proprietors wanting no more of it, and the proletariat yet
driven by their animal instinct to continue producing it. At this point
we have the unemployed, and the value of unskilled labour-force down to
nothing. Naturally, the proprietors take as much as they want for
nothing, keeping it alive in such condition as they require it by
feeding it with a portion of its own produce. They may even turn it, at
its own cost, into skilled labour-force in such quantities as they
desire; and, though the first few educated will avail themselves of
free contract to obtain a price for the
exceptional utility of their services, continuation of the education
process will bring down the value of skilled labour-force to zero also.
So that finally, by the operation of population increase and
Individualism, the proprietors attain as much labour-force, skilled and
unskilled, as they desire, absolutely for nothing: the workers not only
maintaining one another at the various standards of comfort required by
their different specific utilities (the doctor, for instance, needing
for the purposes of the proprietors more expensive habits and education
than the shepherd), but, as policemen, soldiers, sheriffs, etc.,
preventing one another from waxing fat and kicking.

Here again, though Marx missed the theory, he did not miss the
facts. No one could show more forcibly how wage so effectually reached
a bare subsistence for labour, that a danger arose of its going beyond
that, and thelaw had to interfere to prevent the individual labourers
being used up faster, instead of exactly as fast, as they could be
replaced.[2] Further, he is not only aware
that the unemployed are always with us: he actually forces them
strenuously on our attention as a reserve army of industry which
guarantees the employer against scarcity of labour power at sudden
revivals of trade. He seems even to see that the unemployed are
unemployed because their labour has no utility, and that havingno
utility it can have no exchange value; but fie
does not see that, by what is sometimes called "the law of
indifference", it is impossible for one part of the stock of a
commodity available a t an y given time to have value whilst another
part has none, since no man will give a price for that which he can
obtain for nothing. This second oversight of his is the more
remarkable, as it puts the condition of the proletariat in a light much
more terrible than does his assumption that the subsistence wage is the
value of the labour force, a view as untenable even on Marxian
principles as thatthe manufacturer's coal bill and water rate are the
value of his steam power. I can imagine a Marxite, on the spur ofthe
moment, pointing out here that the labour socially necessary to produce
a clay's victual or a day's coals can be separated from that necessary
to produce a labourer or steam engine; but both must enter into the
value of the power they produce; and Marx himself carefully proves in
the case of the steam engine that it transmits to the product not only
the value of its fuel food, but of itself. But when he attempts, as he
does, to differentiate labour power from steam power, the man from the
engine, his logic breaks down. He is as usual quite right as to the
fact that labour power differs from steam power and other commodities;
but he mistakes the difference. As we have seen, the momentous
peculiarity of labour power is that, unlike all other marketable
commodities, its supply is not checked when no more is
wanted: it will be produced even when the producers are losing
desperately by it, Marx's unsound analysis of wares and consequent
error as to valueblinded him to this; and he tried to account for the
peculiarity of labour power by other differences which either do not
really exist, or, like the specific differences in labour or in
utilities, have no economic significance. Thus he pointed out that six
hours' labour will prime a man to work twelve hours. But the same thing
is true of asteam engine, from which he insists that no surplus labour,
and consequently no surplus value, can be got. He cannot escape the
parallel by saying that steam power is riot human power; for that
difference is one of the specific differences in the method of applying
energy which he expressly abstracted in his analysis of wares; and,
besides, he states directly in his first chapter that "productive
activity, if we leave out of sight its special
form, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power". Unless, by
insisting on the ordinary interpretation of this statement, wedismiss
it as false on the face of it, we must take it to mean that steam power
is only a special form of human labour power: therefore "surplus" steam
power, which, taking the word "surplus" in Marx's sense, is the hardest
of hard facts, is surplus human labour power, and consequently produces
surplus value. Yet Marx's whole theory of the origin of surplus value
depends on the accuracy of his demonstration that steam power,
machinery, etc., cannot possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were
right, then a capital of £10,000, invested in a business requiring
£9,000 for machinery and plant, and £1,000 for wages (or human labour
power) would only return one ninth of the surplus value returned by an
equal capital of which £1,000 was in the form of plant, and . £9,000
in wage capital. As a matter of fact the "surplus value" from both is
found to be equal. At this difficulty Mr. Frederick Engels is nothing
abashed. He glories in it, and challenges all and sundry to solve it
before he, by publishing the third hook, reconciles that and many other
irreconcilables. But his challenge only concerns the Marxites
themselves; for the difficulty is created by the surplus value theory,
and does not exist for those who have not adopted that theory. To them,
the very name "surplus value" is a contradiction in terms; and to those
of them who are Socialists the implication that what takes place
between the proprietors and the proletariat is an exchange
of wares,is specially objectionable. The third book may
reconcile the contradiction; but it will do so by practically recanting
the errors of the first. This is said with the greater confidence
because, even in this first book, Marx, as he goes on, leaves his own
theorising far behind.

I must now leave the subject with a confession that I never
took up a book that proved better worth reading than "Capital". It is
unavoidable that the merits of the book should occupy a relatively
insignificant space here; whilst, on the contrary, its errors occupy a
relatively insignificant space in the book. In pointing out these
errors, and so implying that Marx was fallible, I have incurred the
risk of being accused, as I once was by an enthusiastic Marxite at a
public meeting, of attempting to pooh-pooh Marx as an idiot.
Undoubtedly I have taken a course somewhere between that and
worshipping him as a God. To me it seems that his errors arose from
several causes. He was a born materialist; and when lie attempted to
carve a theory with the tools of the born metaphysician, he cut his
fingers. In his time, too, the germ of the truth about value lay in the
old supply and demand theory, which was historically anti-popular,
whereas the labour theory of Ricardo had a delusive air of being the
reverse. Again, the question of the value of labour force was
inseparable from the population question; and that, too, he disliked as
a recognized staple of capitalist apologetics. This was prejudiced,
doubtless; and it cost him the coveted secret of value; but he knew the
condition of the people; and his sympathies were too wide and his
imagination too active to permit him to investigate economic subjects
in the purely scientific spirit of Jevons. He would have been more or
less than human if he could have written the history of capital with
academic coolness. The Marxites who cannot bear to admit that a person
named Jevons was right where Marx was wrong, may console themselves
with the reflection that a person named Young was right where Newton
was wrong, and that Newton's reputation stands nevertheless.

I am strongly tempted to launch into a description of the
extraordinary picture of modern industrialism which gives the book its
main force and fascination; but I have already abused the indulgence of
the editors beyond all reason in the matter of space. My last word for
the present is-Read Jevons and the rest for your economics; and read
Marx for thehistory of their working in the past, and the conditions of
their application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.

G. Bernard Shaw

[1] This fact is of interest to
students of Adam Smith-The radical mistake made by him was his
assumption that men are insatiable, from which it would follow that a
man with a million servants would be as anxious to have a million-and
first as a man with only one servant is to have a second. If that were
so, then poverty could never appear until the population began to
overtax the fertility of the earth. But it is not so; and by failing to
see that, Adam Smith missed the solution of the labor problem.

[2] it should be borne in mind here
that a bare subsistence for the labor required to satisfy the
proprietors (the true wage fund of individualism) does not mean
sufficient subsistence to enable cad.)
individual laborer 10 live out hit natural term of life, Dr. Drysdale
has estimated the lifetime of a Lambeth wage-worker at 29 years, and
that of a gentleman of means at 55. But if the labor power of the
wage-worker used up at 29 can be replaced by that of a fresh laborers
labor has had its subsistence wage, though the individual laborer has
been starved.